"As an industry trend, advancement in heterogeneous hardware has progressed at a rapid pace. This in turn has fueled developer desire to target such hardware for accelerated computation, necessitating a significant step forward in programming models to enable such practices. C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism (C++ AMP) is a new technology implemented in Visual Studio 11 that helps C++ developers use accelerators such as the GPU for parallel programming."

Heh, typical Microsoft to introduce yet another framework to the mix, of course with Visual Studio specific language extensions. Either way, open spec or not this is targeted and will most likely only be used on Windows. On other platforms I believe OpenCL as a low level api and something like Thrust as a high level api will be choice de facto due to being fully cross-platform.

Perhaps more interesting is how Microsoft seems to be making a huge 'native code' push again, wasn't that long ago that people were saying that managed code is the future and that Microsoft would go all but fully managed. Guess reality caught up